MTC User Equipment (UE), also called Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communication UE, is a mainly applied in the existing Internet of Things. Low power consumption and low cost are important guarantees for its large-scale application. Smart metering type equipment is one of the most typical applications of MTC equipment. Most of smart metering type MTC equipment is fixedly mounted in an environment with low coverage performance, such as a basement. In order to keep normal communication between such MTC equipment and a base station system, deployment of additional equipment such as a station and a relay is required, which may undoubtedly greatly increase deployment cost of an operating company. Smart metering type MTC equipment mainly sends a small data packet, has a low requirement on data rate, and is tolerant to a greater data transmission time delay.
Since smart metering type MTC equipment has an extremely low requirement on data rate, for a data channel, correct transmission of a small data packet may be ensured in manners of lower modulation coding rate, multiple repeated sending in the time domain and the like. For System Frame Number (SFN) information required to be sent to a terminal, frame number information in an existing Long Term Evolution (LTE) system is included in a Master Information Block (MIB), a scheduling period for sending the MIB is 40 ms, and the MIB is sent four times on a broadcast channel of a subframe 0 of each radio frame within 40 ms. As shown in FIG. 1, each of system information coded block 1, system information coded block 2, system information coded block 3 and system information coded block 4 contains complete MIB information, and may be independently decoded. An MIB message in every 40 ms is kept unchanged, and an SFN in the next MIB message may change.
In order to improve coverage performance of an MTC terminal and ensure normal communication between such equipment and a base station system, it is necessary to increase sending times of an MIB within a 40 ms scheduling period. In addition, for some conventional user terminals in a low-coverage environment, it is also necessary to increase sending times of system information, thereby ensuring that the terminals may keep normal communication with the base station system. Since the user terminals with low-coverage in different cells have different coverage enhancement requirements and the user terminals with low-coverage in the same cell may also require different coverage enhancement grades, it is necessary to design corresponding approaches for sending system information with respect to requirements on different grades of coverage enhancement to ensure that the user terminals may correctly receive the corresponding system information.